Ratan Tipirneni, M.J. Golibart and Bjorn Engelhardt Join Actifio

Actifio, Inc., the copy data virtualization company, today announced the addition of three proven industry veterans – Ratan Tipirneni, M.J. Golibart and Bjorn Engelhardt – to its global management team.

The three represent a combined 75 years experience in enterprise technology, and all have longstanding relationships with existing Actifio team members.

Actifio has experienced rapid growth and expansion so far in 2014, fueled by mounting market focus on the copy data management challenge first addressed by the company’s data virtualization platform, and a $100 million series E financing round in March.

The company now counts over 500 enterprise users across customers in 36 counties, managing more than an exabyte of enterprise production data. Dozens of cloud service provider partners now have Actifio-powered copy data virtualization offerings in development or in market, delivering public and hybrid cloud copy data management services to enterprise customers around the world.

 Bringing more than 25 years of software executive leadership, marketing, engineering and services experience to meet the challenges of rapid growth, Ratan Tipirneni joins Actifio as VP, global customer success, reporting to CEO Ash Ashutosh. His focus will be on building and leading a global customer success engineering team dedicated to the realization of business success for Actifio users. Prior to Actifio, he served as the senior director of smart support services product management and business development at Cisco, where he and his team transformed the service delivery model through software automation that captured network diagnostic data and transformed it into actionable insights. He previously led Cisco’s new software models initiative, where he was instumental in developing the company’s SaaS business model. His previous career experience includes the role of VP, GM at SupportSoft, the founding and leadership of two enterprise technology SaaS start-ups, and senior product management and engineering roles at Sun Microsystems. He earned an MBA in Marketing from Santa Clara University, an MS in Computer Science from Louisiana State University, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Osmania University. He resides in California’s Silicon Valley with his wife and two children.

“I am thrilled to be joining Ash and this incredible team at such an exciting point in the trajectory of this company,” said Tipirneni. “Our sales process begins with a commitment to deliver transformational business value to our users, and I and my team are committed to continue to deliver on that commitment.“

Rick Wojcik, who had previously served as the GM of Actifio’s AsiaPac and Japan (APJ) business, will now lead the expanding cloud service provider business unit. He joined Actifio in 2012 from IBM where he led the storage business for growth markets, having previously served as the CEO of Atempo, a backup software provider.

 Taking over Actifio’s AsiaPac/Japan business is Bjorn Engelhardt, previously VP of strategic sales and cloud services at Symantec, now VP and GM for Actifio APJ. He brings local management experience and executive relationships, having joined Symantec through Veritas‘ acquisition of Enterprise Vault (KVS) in 2004. Before that he served in senior roles at Citrix including director of sales for Australia and New Zealand and director of channel business.

M.J. Golibart joins Actifio to lead a Mid-Atlantic ‘Super Region’ including growing Federal business, and established teams in the Southeast and Central Regions. He brings more than 25 years experience to the role, having most recently driven the triple-digit sales growth of IBM‘s all-flash storage array as the North American sales leader for IBM flash systems. Before that, he worked closely with Actifio president Jim Sullivan at IBM XIV, where he served as South East regional sales leader. Prior to that he was VP of sales and marketing at NovusCG, and held multiple sales and sales positions at EMC.

“The key to building a billion dollar business is building a billion dollar team,” said Ashutosh. “Having achieved that milestone together, we’re now focused on the next one: building a multi-billion dollar business. The key to getting there is continuing to invest in the caliber of people we’re announcing today, people who bring new ideas and unique experiences to the table, along with the values all Actifians share: customer-first, accountability, respect for the individual, and excellence in all we do.”